My 12 year old daughter, to whom these kind of things matter, tells me that girls nowadays have several categories of ‘best friend’, including such acronyms as BFF, Best Friend Forever, and the less permanent-sounding BFFN, Best Friend For Now. I’m pleased to say that this blog has a new BFFN, in the shape of Mike Whitaker, who has kindly sent me a long list of additions to my Operation Chastise complete crew list. These were mainly links to websites which describe the fate of the aircraft used on the Dams Raid. I have added a new page to the Breaking the Dams website which uses all this information.
I’ve also added more online information to the PDF list about several other Operation Chastise aircrew including Henry Maudslay, Richard Bolitho, Lawrence Nichols, Donald Hopkinson and Jack Liddell. Liddell was the youngest airman in the Dambusters: he was only 18 when he was killed, flying as the rear gunner in Norman Barlow’s aircraft. He must have lied about his age when he joined up in May 1941.
Links to two of the online exhibits at the RAF Museum, Mick Martin and Charles Brennan’s logbooks have also been added. If you look carefully at the Brennan exhibit you can see that the signature of the acting OC of 617 Squadron is that of David Maltby, doing the grisly job of signing off the logbooks of dead aircrew while Guy Gibson was on leave.
You can find everything in the new list on the Breaking the Dams website.
Dambusters Blog 